Jindřich Chalupecký Award: Invitation for Final 2016

An international jury has selected the following five finalists of the 27th edition of Czech Republic’s most prestigious award for artists up to the age of 35: Aleš Čermák, Katarína Hládeková, Anna Hulačová, Matyáš Chochola and Johana Střížková. After a series of side events held in the first half of the year across the Czech Republic, the artists will introduce themselves at the fall exhibition at the Trade Fair Palace in Prague.

For this occasion, they are preparing new projects ranging from sculptural and audiovisual installations through experimental work with the medium of photography to short film essays. Their common denominator is the fragile tension between a poetic and engaged approach to the latest themes and challenges. The exhibition is not conceived as a juxtaposition of individual “competing” principles but rather as a space for a generous presentation of five remarkable artists of the up-and-coming generation with the aim of providing them with as much conceptual and production background for their current work as possible. The exhibition will also be accentuated as a whole representing an account of a certain time and a certain generation, merging the individual approaches and supplementing them with unexpected contexts.

The novelty of this year’s edition of Jindřich Chalupecký Award is the launch of the tradition of an international guest who will introduce his or her project in connection with the exhibition of the finalists. It will be a distinctive artist whose work resonates with the current events on the Czech art scene, although it may not have been introduced here in great detail so far. The guest of 2016 is Laure Prouvost, the first French artist, based in London and Antwerp, to win UK’s prestigious Turner Prize in 2013.

Prouvost employs a truly intermedia approach. She combines video, painting, object and site-specific audiovisual installations in her work, creating forceful, often even theatrical scenes and environments. She deals with the themes of nature, sexuality and seduction in relation to the power of money, contemporary relics and technologies, also fabulating about her grandparents and relating them to the Dada movement. Her unique, visually and conceptually attractive works include the important element of play with language, text and communication possibilities in general